My regular readers know that the Pop!Tech conference, held in October in beautiful Camden, Maine, is one of the highlights of my year. The conference combines some of the very best speakers on science, technology, society and social change with an environment designed to force people to make new friends and talk to people they’ve never met before. Plus, it’s in one of the most beautiful places in the world at the very peak of autumn. I spoke at Pop!Tech three years ago, and have worked the past few years to rope friends into the community as speakers and bloggers.

Pop!Tech is now offering a pretty fascinating job opportunity – official Pop!Tech blogger. This doesn’t (neccesarily) mean competing with me to liveblog the conference – though, hey, bring it on. Instead, it means that you’re responsible for maintaining the Pop!Tech blog through the year, featuring people and ideas that have been, might be or could be featured at the conference. The work that Wayne Hall has done on the excellent IdeaFestial blog is good example of what you can do with a platform like this.

Pop!Tech is looking for an established blogger for this position, and is offering $1000 a month, plus a pass to the conference (a $3500 value.) If you’re interested, drop a line to jobs AT poptech DOT org and tell ‘em Ethan sent you. (More to the point, tell them where your blog is, point them to some of your best posts and write a great cover letter telling them why you’re the right person for the job. Jeez, do I have to tell you everything?)

It’s almost half a week from the end of Pop!Tech and I’m still exhausted. I’d like to tell you that this is because I partied hard, like some of my fellow bloggers, and am deep in sleep debt. It’s not true – I figured out a couple of years ago that I’m getting older and that the only way to liveblog these things is to sleep nine hours a night before each session.

No, the more logical answer is that my brain is full. I’ve been to so many excellent conferences this year, heard so many strong speakers that I’m still processing many of the interesting, challenging and exciting ideas these gatherings raise. In that sense, I’m grateful for Joe McCarthy’s summary post of Pop!Tech, which selects a particularly strong quote for each of the speakers, leaving me with a core idea to difest, rather than the pages of verbiage I’ve offered for each…

While I get a lot out of liveblogging these events, I’m starting to think that I may not be doing it as much in the future. One reason is that I’m apparently scaring some others off from blogging each session. Several bloggers came up to me during or after Pop!Tech and thanked me for blogging each event, telling me that because I was blogging each session, they would be focusing on blogging longer, sythesis posts or on commentary on the event. That’s great – I’m grateful for those posts, and I agree that there’s no need for everyone to do the same thing at a conference.

But I miss having other people’s liveblogging to rely on. I really enjoy blogging conferences with Bruno Giussani because we get different things out of the talks and produce different summaries. I suspect that if there were half a dozen livebloggers at each of these events, we’d all produce slightly different accounts and that people really interested in those talks would benefit from comparing all those accounts… It’s a bit like what’s happened with the shrinking number of daily newspapers in most cities – it can be very useful to have half a dozen takes on the day’s events, not just the facts as reported by AP or Reuters.

The other reason is that I want to find more time to talk about these ideas with people when I’m at the conference. Pop!Tech is excellent about this – their technique of mixing attendees by sending them to different locations for lunch is something that all conferences should emulate – but I still am finding that liveblogging is cutting into my conversation time. I spent two days of the conference sitting with Joel Johnson of BoingBoing Gadgets and had an excellent conversation/argument about the perceptions of Kiva in the geek and the international development communities (I have high hopes of writing this up at some point after I’ve processed a bit more). I find myself wondering how many more useful conversations I could have if I could find the right balance between liveblogging and conversing – I’m guessing that the solution isn’t to stop blogging entirely, as I get much more out of these conferences by blogging than I would by just listening…

From Pop!Tech, I went directly to a very different kind of conference, a meeting of Monitor Networks, a new group that’s something between a speaker’s agency, a consulting group, and a thinktank. It’s a group of absolutely amazing people, and I’m honored (and, to be frank, a little intimidated) to be in the same room as these folks.

The topic for a day-long meeting was the future of cities, especially the sorts of huge cities that are increasingly common in the future. One of the presenters at the event was Mike Hawley, who’s working on a project called 19.20.21, which is collecting and presenting information about 19 cities which will have populations over 20 million in the 21st century. (There’s likely more cities that will cross that threshhold, but 19 is a nice way to limit the set.) Another was Chris Luebkeman, who gave a brilliant talk on the urbanization of the planet at Pop!Tech, and Stewart Brand, who has turned his formidible intellect to this topic in recent years.

Brand gave a typically badass talk to frame these issues. Some of the highlights:

- We’re becoming an urban planet. 3% of the world’s population lived in cities in 1800, 14% in 1900 and at least 61% of the world will live in cities by 2030. He thinks we’ll top out at about 80% worldwide, the percentage that’s common in developed countries. (You need some percentage of humanity to grow crops and tend forests, and some of us – like me – just like it better out here.)

- The largest cities wordwide in 1900 were in Western Europe and the US. In 1950, that set included some major global cities like Tokyo and Beijing. By 2000, that set was majority developing world. There’s an odd circularity to this – in 1000, most of the largest cities in the world were outside the West as well. “History is what happens in cities. The developing world is taking over history by taking over the world’s largest cities,” Brand tells us. “The thousand-year rise of the West is over,” and we’re back to a “medieval form of globalization.”

- While it’s sexy to consider the megacities – and Brand is involved with the 19.20.21 project – the action’s in the secondary and tertiary cities. Lagos is exciting, but so are Ouagadougou and Bamako. (Pressed for a definition of secondary and tertiary cities, Brand offers cities under 500,000 as tertiary, 500k – 5 million as secondary. These secondary and tertiary cities are attracting a huge number of immigrants from rural areas – 1.3 billion people in the next two decades.

- Cities are population sinks. People in cities reproduce less frequently than their rural counterparts, due to the liberation of women, the education of men and women, the distractions offered by urban life. As a result, population growth in cities comes from elders and the middle aged in established cities. In new cities, it comes from immigrants from the villages. The net result: “We’ve got new cities full of young people, old cities full of old people and a remote countryside that’s more visited than lived in.”

- Rural landscapes are “radically emptying” – you can find villages around the world that no one lives in anymore on every continent. Why? “Because life really sucks for women in villages.” The work is “dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, dangerous, and static.” While there’s a hope that technology will help transform rural life, for now people in rural areas look towards cities and see a life that’s “exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, safe, and upwardly mobile.”

- Many of the people who are moving to cities are moving to slums. Squatters are the dominant city builders in the world today, moving from cardboard to tin to masonry, leaving rebar sticking out from the roof so they can add more rooms if economic circumstances improve. While they’re often stealing power or other utilities, they would be customers if they could… something that smart power companies are beginning to embrace.

Brand argues that squatters care about:
- Security of tenure – they want assurances that they’ll own their homes before they improve them
- Location – they want to be near jobs
- Water, sanitation, electricity
- Protection from crime, whether it comes from the police, or from gangs
- Education – it’s one of the main reasons to move to cities

They don’t care about:
- Housing – they build it themselves
- Phones – everyone’s got a mobile phone
- Starvation – people don’t starve in cities, while they still do in the countryside
- Medical care – it’s available to a much greater extent than it is in rural areas
- Unemployment – Everyone works, though generally in the informal economy: food stalls, internet cafes, mobile “phone booths”, bars, hairdressers, churches, tailors, copy shops…

- The informal economy is the “dark matter” of economic theory – we know it exists, we know it’s huge (as much as 60% of the total economic activity in developing nations) and economists don’t know how to model it. The “rent of undeeded property, constructions of undeeded buildings, employment in unlicensed untaxed businesses, services in unlicensed and untaxed business, and remittances from illegal workers overseas” all need to be understood to solve economic problems in developing nations.

- Squatter cities, he tells us, are resilient, robust, and vibrant. They’re green, he argues, because they’re very dense and because everything is recycled. (I would call bullshit on this, having spent a lot of time in cities where there’s little infrastructure for sewage, making these some of the foulest-smelling and unhealthiest “green” places on the planet.) They’re created by individual motivation, but supported by complex family, neighborhood and religious networks. They’re the source of hope moving forward for lifting people out of poverty.

Brand offers a terrific reading list for understanding these cities:
Robert Neuwirth – Shadow Cities
Nicholas Sullivan – You Can Hear Me Now
CK Prahalad – The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Phillip Longman – The Empty Cradle
Gregory David Roberts – Shantaram
Suketu Mehta – Maximum City

But the fun starts when the twenty or so people in our audience get the chance to drill into Brand’s contentions and ask tough questions:

- Are these cities really safe places? Aren’t rural communities generally a great deal safer than high-density urban ones? (Brand argues that crime in big cities is frequently poor on rich, not poor on poor, suggesting that they might be safer for these new migrants than for established dwellers.)

- Most of these cities are coastal. Won’t rising sea levels spell catastrophe for them? (Nope – sea levels rise slowly. Catastrophe is much more likely from dought and from weird weather than from rising seas, which we can adapt to.)

- Won’t connectivity make rural areas more exciting and liveable and reverse the rural to urban flow? (Cities are about connectivity, Brand argues – they’re one of the oldest and most basic technologies to connect people.)

We break into groups to talk through some of these issues – I end up in a small group that includes a military strategist, a designer and business thinkers. Our group focused on questions of efficiency and effectiveness, an outgrowth of conversations about bottom-up and top-down strategies.

If you’ve got the ability to plan an entire city – as Luebkeman does with Dongtan – you’ll construct a city around public transportation, designing systems that make cars as close to obsolete as possible. But if millions of people are making their individual transportation decisions, they’ll likely choose to maximize their personal mobility, and will probably choose to own their own cars. A centrally-designed mass transit system is much more efficient, at least in terms of carbon dioxide production, space usage, etcetera. But letting people choose to buy cars may well be more effective, unless you’re capable of building really amazing public transit systems.

Part of what’s admired about squatter cities and slums is how effective they are – people find individual solutions to problems that are highly effective. But many of these systems are extremely inefficient – letting everyone work out their own solid waste problem isn’t nearly as efficient as a central sewage system. One question is whether it’s possible to turn bottom-up actions – motivated by effectiveness on a personal level – can turn into efficient systems, designed to help lots of people. Another question asks whether you can talk about effectiveness and efficiency in absolute terms, or whether we need to consider them along different axes – fiscal, environmental, innovation, etc.

I have high hopes that thinking about incremental infrastructure in terms of efficiency and effectiveness will help me clarify that idea. And whether or not it helps me think through this particular idea, brainstorming within a frame that I don’t spend much time thinking about – megacities – was an awfully good reminder that thinking and talking with other people is at least as important as listening to brilliant people speaking on stage.

The last three amazing speakers leave the stage, and there’s the sound of a marching band entering from the back of the auditorium. It’s the Hungry March Band, a group of musicians and burlesque-style entertainers, who take the stage in chaotic costume and play something between New Orleans funeral music and free jazz and seem to be having chaotic fun as everyone finds their bags and wanders out of the hall.

And just like that, it’s over – another overwhelmingly full three days, and – if BBEdit can be believed – roughly 22,000 words from me. Wow. Thanks to anyone who’s been reading, commenting and saying nice things about conference blogging.

Let me not forget that there’s a great crew of fellow bloggers here, doing their best to cover the events, usually from the shadows of the basement screening room. I really enjoyed sharing a couch with Joel Johnson from BoingBoing’s new Gadgets blog – he and I disagreed on several speakers, which made for excellent conversation. I was lucky enough to drive up with Jules Rincôn, who’s covering the conference en español on her blog, and Evgeny Morozov, who’s covering events on his blog and for The Economist. I’ve really enjoyed meeting Paris Marashi, who’s reporting in Farsi for Global Voices. And love and respect to everyone who’s been liveblogging the event, and to everyone who will write about the event after the fact.

The technorati tag PopTech2007 is pretty helpful for finding coverage of events, including in Popular Science Blogs, Next Billion and Underwire. Reading all these folks wouldn’t be the worst way to spend the rest of your weekend.

Thanks, Pop!Tech, for another excellent conference. Looking forward to the next oine, sometime after I regain feeling in the tips of my fingers.

Van Jones is best known as a civil rights activist and founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. But he takes the stage at Pop!Tech and introduces a new project, Green for All. He tells us that he’ll be offering “the powerpoint presentation Al Gore would do if he was black.”

He knows we’re asking, “What’s a nice black guy like this doing in a green movement like ours?” The answer: “I just got tired of going to funerals.” Jones has been working on trying to get kids out of jail and into jobs. He tells us, “You might think of California as a liberal bastion, but we could call it ‘Calabama’ in terms of how we lock up children.” One of four people in prison on the planet are in the US, and they’re mostly black, latino and poor.

When Jones was at Yale Law School, he tells us he would stand on a block and see kids at college do drugs, and kids in the housing projects do drugs. “Same block, same age, same drugs.” When Yale kids got into trouble, their grades were put on pause, and they were able to take a break. “And they went to Europe for a while, then came back and became doctors, lawyers, accountants, President of the United States.” And people in the housing projects went to prison.

“I was going to be a big hero, fix the prison system, the police. I was burned out.” So he went on a spirituality retreat. “In my neighborhood, you don’t tell people you’re going to a spirituality nothing. I said I was going for a hike.” And he went half an hour away to Marin, and discovered the emerging green movement. “People are eating this ambrosia like thing,. they call it tofu… People walking around with these tubes – are they weapons? No, they’re yoga mats… It’s a tale of two cities.”

Jones wants to know whether this new green movement is going to lift all boards, “or are we going to have eco-apartheid?” New green industries mean new jobs. Jones wonders, “Can we connect work that most needs doing with people who most need work?” He wants, “green jobs, not jails.”

“The green movement believes that we pass the right laws and then magical green fairies put up all the solar panels.” And this green movement is powerful. While Jones couldn’t get enough traction for his work on jails to jobs, he’s got an interested audience when he talks about green jobs.

He offers an interesting model which he calls “the Fourth Quadrant”. One side of a matrix is grey versus green; the other is rich versus poor. The grey side are the problems, the green are the solutions. Traditional environmentalism focused on the grey, “The polar bears are going to die, the rain forests are going to die, will you please join my group? It wasn’t working too well.”

Jones posits that rich and poor people see these problems differently. Wealthy people see the problems in terms of charismatic megafauna – the polar bears are dying. And Jones tells us, “They’re right to care about it. When the polar bears go, we’re next.” But if you knock on a door in Watts and try to get people to care about the polar bears, you might have some problems. When people there consider environmental problems, they’re talking about toxins, asthma, garbage and people drowning in hurricane Katrina. And they’re right too. “We’ve had a racially segregated environmental movement for twenty years,” where environmentalists face off against the environmental justice movement.

When we think of solutions, the wealthy think about buying a Prius, or about “solar panels on my second home.” These solutions are about jobs and consumption for rich people. When poor people think of solutions, they should think about “green collar jobs”.

“If you learn to install solar panels, you’re on your way to becoming an electrical engineer. If you learn to weatherize windows, you’re on your way to being a glazier, which is a union job.” And these jobs aren’t outsourceable.

Jones’s focus is on starting a Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, funded with $250,000 from the Oakland city counsel. And he’s working with Nancy Pelosi to introduce legislation sponsoring a national corps that will train 30,000 people a year in green trades. President Clinton has signed onto the “Green for All” campaign to help spread this idea further.

(I’m glad Van Jones is working on these issues, but I hope he’s working with amazing people like Majora Carter, who has been promoting the idea that “black is the new green” for some time now, pushing forward environmental justice in her community.)

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International, introduces herself as an Iraqi. “15 years ago, I came to US. When I told people I came from Iraq and they stepped back from me. Now they say, ‘I’m sorry’.”

War, she tells us, is about fear. When growing up, her family had conversations about whether they should sleep in the same room so that a bomb would kill them all, or whether they should sleep in separate rooms, so that some family members would survive. These are the sorts of frontline discussions women have during war, about keeping life going. In Bosnia, Salbi tells us, she heard music from a music school during the siege. The school was staffed by women, who were keeping the music school going as an act of resistance.

She tells us about a woman in southern Sudan, whose experience of war is the experience of walking, walking almost constantly for 18 years. When Salbi asked her about peace, she said, “Peace means that I have toenails.” Peace, Salbi tells us, is about how my life will improve.

Salbi was in Iraq shortly after the US invasion. A friend observed, “The first thing you ask someone who’s woken from a coma after thirty years isn’t what kind of democracy they want – It’s what they want to eat.” She points out that 80% of the world’s refugees are women. The people who keep life going in those refugee camps and during war are women. “It’s amazing that we don’t have these people at the negotiating table.”

Women are bellweathers for societies – violence against women preceded war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We should see the hundreds of thousands of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo being raped as a clear sign that things are very dangerous.

But progress also starts with women. We can remind people that 500,000 women got raped in 100 days in Rwanda. “But it’s the unfair way to start the discussion,” she says, since now 49.9% of the parliament in Rwanda is women, and every ministry has a gender budget.

In communities like Iraq, insurents prey on widows. They go to those widows with sacks of rice and say, “Give us one son, we’ll give you the rice sack,” so you can save your other seven children. We need to compete in the street with rice sacks, by helping people eat.

Fourteen years ago, she started Women for Women International, which asks women in wealthy countries to sponsor women in desperate situations. It costs $27 a month, and the women are encourage to communicate with one another. “It’s a form of public diplomacy. We can try to humanize America.” And it works sometime – she tells us about an Iraqi woman spraying rose water on a letter before sending it to her American sponsor. She asked why the woman was using rose water, usually reserved for sacred rituals. “She’s saving my life,” the woman said. And Women for Women has now supported 120,000 women around th world.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

It’s a challenge to blog everyone who comes across the Pop!Tech stage. The pace isn’t quite as frenetic as at a conference like TED, but it’s pretty damned exhausting. I’ve been cheating by not mentioning most of the entertainers who’ve come across the stage. Two who I was really moved by were
Kelly Joe Phelps and Vanessa German.

Phelps followed the most recent session on Islam with a few sweet moments of fingerpicking and sweet, sad songs. He’s deeply rooted in the blues, but has a songwriter’s ear and an amazing, emotive, soft voice. I’ll be buying several of his albums when I get home.

Before lunch yesterday, Vanessa German brought the audience to its feet and some of us to tears with her poetry. She’s an astounding performer, animating her words with hand gestures so expressive they could be their own language. She projects energy as she talks about justice, freedom and race … and meeting her offstage, that energy and intensity is just as powerful as it is when she’s under the lights. (She also must be one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met.)

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Lt. Commander Charles Swift, a lawyer for the US armed forces, is pretty inspiring as well. He was the defense attorney for Salim Hamdan, who was briefly Osama bin Laden’s driver, and who was held at Guantanamo.

It’s hard to imagine the pressure Swift was under. He says, “if we didn’t go along with the president, the next big attack would be our fault.” Counterbalancing this was what he learned in visiting Hamdan’s family in Yemen. He shows a photo of Hamdan’s two young daughters in the arms of his female colleague, Sarah. He tells us that Hamdan’s mother brought a group of children together and said, “This is Susan. Susan went to school She studied very, very hard. She’s a lawyer. If you go to school, if you study very, very hard, you can be anything.”

At that moment, Swift realized that “we were alienating the most powerful ally we could have,” the people in the Middle East who want their families and their children to have better lives.

In Swift’s previous career, he was “damage control assistant,” responsible for controlling fires on ships. He explains that fires require oxygen, heat and fuel. Remove one of the three and the fire goes out. There’s a new model these days, which suggests that you can also stop a fire by stopping the exchange of free radicals.

This may well be true in terrorism as well. For terror, you need a breakdown of social order, a radicalized population and training and materials. But you also might stop terrorism by eliminating the free radicals. That’s what we’re doing in fighting terror. We’re holding people
“not for what they’ve done, but for what they might do.” We are conducting, “cooercive interrogations, because we don’t have intel that works.” And we’re increasing surveillance on ourselves and the world.

The administration tells us “look how good it’s worked – there have been no major attacks since we started doing this.” No argument from Swift. But these methods have increased the fuel and the oxygen of the terrorism triangle. And the addiction to fossil fuel means money just keeps piling in for training and materials.

So we need to try an alternative approach. Terrorism comes from failed states. “Iraq, Iran, North Korea wouldn’t incubate terrorists – it’s against their national interest. Failed states don’t have national interests.” He reminds us that it’s very expensive to put a failed state back together – we need to prevent them from falling apart. We’ve got tons of potential failed states in Africa, and we need to prevent them from falling apart. We have to focus on health care, poverty and rule of law.

He tells us that the solutions we’ve been talking about here at Pop!Tech can address terror. “If you come out of here saysing ‘I’m for women’s rights, for lighting in poor communities,’ you’re also a frontline warrior in the struggle against international terrorism.” This struggle can’t be won by the military itself or by governments. “I really don’t care why you’re saving Kenya – just save it. It will make us safer.”

He tells us a story he heard from Osama bin Laden’s former security chief, a man named Nasser. Nasser left bin Laden because he disagreed on what was a legitimate target and didn’t want to target women and children. Nasser told him about being in Afghanistan, when saw a soldier appearing from the distance. As they watched the soldier under a heavy backpack, they noticed her odd gait. He walked up to her and discovered that she was a French nurse for Doctors without Borders. His comrades laughed at him for talking with her. He said to them, “She’ll convert twenty for everyone we will with her medicine.”

He tells us, “Once we figure it out, we’ll get twenty, they’ll get one and we can’t lose.”

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Dr. John Esposito leads a conversation titled “Dialog With/In Islam”. He points out that Islam is a powerful and visible force – the second or third largest religion, the majority religion in more than 50 nations. Esposito remembers that he was considered crazy by his Catholic colleagues when he decided to take on Islam as a field of study. That all changed during the Iranian revolution: “Khomeni, Iran – I owe them my career and my Lexus. Osama bin Laden, my Lexus coupe.”

In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, Islam was invisible to most of us as we grew up – we didn’t see mosques in our communities, or hindu temples. As a result, we have very little context for understanding struggles within Islam. “Imagine a bunch of Buddhists watching northern Ireland – what is it about those Catholics and Protestants and the way they go at it?”

Esposito has worked on a survey of American attitudes about Islam. The majority of Americans, when asked what they admire about Muslims, answered either “nothing or I don’t know.” Ask Muslims anywhere else in the world this question and less than 7% will say there’s nothing they admire – they admire our technology, our openness, many aspects of American society. But Americans seem determined not to understand Islam – right wing students are currently planning Islamofascism week.

Esposito invites three speakers from throughout the Arab world – two muslims, one Christian. The idea is to allow each speaker ten minutes, then bring people into dialog.

Leading off is my friend Daoud Kuttab, the founder of the Institute of Modern Media in Ramallah. He explains that “media in the Arab world is very free… except news about the country you’re actually in.” Qatar, for instance, has great news coverage of everywhere other than Qatar; Lebanon covers Syria well; you can learn a great deal about Saudi Arabia from Jordanian newspapers. But it’s hard to access this information – “The customs agents are the real censors.” They physically mangle newspapers brought across borders.

The internet has made another sort of communication possible – physical borders aren’t the only important ones anymore. Kuttab started AMIN – Arabic Media Internet Network – to take advantage of these capabilities. The word “amin” means truth in arabic, and the ability to read newspapers from other countries is a great way to seek truth from other nations. The network, founded in 1996, had a lot of problems with technology, since it was at that point very difficult to represent Arabic on the web – instead, they generally posted scans of pages and kept them up for a few days.

While AMIN was important for people in urban areas who were literate, the majority of people in the Arab world live outside the capitals, where radio and television is king. “We were cursed in the Arab countries – when radio was in its golden age, in the Arab world, the radio station is the first place the coup plotters go.” As a result, radio stations are considered very important military and political institutions, because you can overthrow a country by taking one over.

In 2000, Daoud wanted to do internet radio, in part to challenge a minister who had declared that “the Internet is free in Jordan.” (He mentions that there are “analog and digital ministers” in the Middle East, technocrats, and ministers who don’t understand technology. I think there’s a good chance that this was an analog minister.) He founded Ammannet.net, armed his reporters with minidisc recorders so they could get “actualities”, and started training journalists. The network had its big breakthrough during a protest at Jordan University. Camera crews from Al Jazeera and others were turned away, but the Ammannet reporter, armed only with a mobile phone and a minidisc recorder, was able to report from the scene. Daoud realized how important these reports were, and asked a friend in Jerusalem to rebroadcast the news over his FM station. Suddenly, Ammannet was available on the air in Amman. “It was something completely illegal done in a legal way.”

Much of Kuttab’s work is now about enabling journalists in the Muslim world. He’s developed a digital media curiculum that’s available at Khaleejnet.net that’s been used to teach in countries throughout the region. He tells us about a group in Yemen – Women Journalists Without Chains – which has been producing breaking news and delivering it over SMS. They simply formed a partnership with the local mobile phone company and shared revenue with them, avoiding all issues of journalistic licensing. They’re now under attack from the government, who’d like to outlaw them, and there are demonstrations in their support every week in front of the Prime Minister’s office.

He tells us about some stories I’ve reported in depth – Google Earth banned in Bahrain, Sami ben Gharbia’s map of Tunisian secret prisons, and about Wa’el Abbas’s films of government officials stuffing ballots boxes and beating people in Egypt. And he reminds us that the technology Arab nations are using to block websites are being produced in America, which is shameful.

Sarah Joseph is editor of Emel Magazine, an alternative British Muslim magazine. She’s a woman with a complicated life, half spent inside and half outside Islam, since she was raised Roman Catholic and converted in adulthood. She identifies herself as being in the “we camp”, seeing solidarity both with Muslims and with Europeans.

She shows us a campaign for washing powder that was hugely successful in the UK, but went over like a lead balloon with Muslims. It’s a series of three images – a green sock, a washing machine and a white sock. “It didn’t work well in the Arab world, because Arabs lead right to left!” she tells us.

Search google images for “muslim” – the images aren’t representative. You’ll get images of burqa-swimsuits, of veiled faces. “They give the impression that no dialog is possible.” She points out that images of UK perceptions of Muslims are quite ugly – she shows a piece of graffiti near her home that says “Avenge USA Killa Muslim Now.”

“Things are done in the name of Islam, yes, they’re done in the name of Christianity, done in the name of democracy.” She argues that you can’t define yourself in the negative – you must affirm what you’re for, what you’re about. Emel Magazine is her attempt to do this – a slick, colorful lifestyle magazine that portrays a much more complex image of what it means to be Muslim.

She ends with a discussion of the idea that Muslims are sometimes thought of as the 5th column, the enemy from within. She shows images of a 19th century cartoon of a bearded Turk destroying a Union Jack, and constrasts this to a contemporary image of female Muslim soccer supporters holding the St. George’s cross flag, the symbol used by English football fans. She points out a fact that few Muslims know – St. George was the half-Palestinian, half-Turkish patron saint of England. There are mosques throughout Turkey named for St. George. “These right wingers wrap themselves in this flag and ask for ‘England for the English’… but the English patron saint is Palestinian and Turkish!”

Dr. Mustafa Ceric – the Grand Mufti of Bosnia – is the last to take the stage. He tells the audience and fellow speakers, “You have a surplus in your technological products, and we have a surplus in our spiritual products. We should exchange, provided we should not become like us, and we should become like you.” He gets a good laugh with a story about a muslim youth wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Don’t panic, I am muslim.” He tells us, “Don’t panic, I am muslim. It’s worse – I am professionally muslim.”

But his next statement changes tone sharply. “I am survivor of genocide in Bosnia, 11 of July 1995. ‘Never again’ was broken, and I survived. 8,000 Muslims died in one day. We understand you, better than anyone in the world, what it means to be under attack from terrorists and genocidal people.” He thanks President Clinton for the intervention to prevent the massacre from spreading.

He shows three quotes from scripture, about the creation of the universe and about the Virgin Mary and quizzes the audience as to whether they came from the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Quaran – we all fail, as all three quotes are Quaranic.

He offers a rapid and confusing explication of Sharia, Islamic law, and Ijtihad, the legal intepretation of Quaranic texts. He suggests that the major problem with Islam is best explained by Max Weber’s theory of charisma. “When Muhammed was alive, everything was okay, but when he died, people went three ways.”

Sunnis, he tells us, want to find a way to routinize the charisma of the Prophet. The Shia believe in living charisma, charisma embodied in contemporary leaders. And the Kharijites believe in the dissemination of charisma, meaning that any pious and able individual could represent Islam – a path the Mufti sees leading to Bin Laden. (I think. He’s talking very quickly and it’s hard to follow this completely.) “We need to routinize our relationship with the west and with the rest of the world.”

He closes by telling us that he’s “proud to be an American-made Mufti”, a product of the University of Chicago. And he warns us, “You may win the war, you may not win the peace. You may be a hero of the war, you may not be the hero of the peace. Let’s fight for the holy peace, not for the holy war.”

The question and answer period isn’t really long enough to generate the sort of free-flowing dialog we might hope for. Jordan is asked what made her convert to Islam – she talks bout “the simplicity of the monotheism”, the fact that there are no arguments in Islam about what is and isn’t included in the Quaran.

Kuttab is asked his opinion of Al Jazeera – he offers a history of the network from its roots as a collaboration between Saudi funders and BBC’s Arabic service. He mentions that Al Jazeera did precisely what Arab media critics asked – it provided real, personal voices, not just the voices of authority, and points out that Al Hurra, by contrast, looks like old-school Arab media, broadcasting the image of President Bush the very first day. And he celebrates Al Jazeera English as the best news network on the air today.

In a later comment, Kuttab notes, “The majority of muslims are not being heard. A small minority of radicals are being heard. But they are touching on true injustices,” of the Arab world, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous.

Esposito closes by telling us that people ask him, “Where are the moderate Muslims and why aren’t they denouncing terror? Well, they are. If you aren’t hearing them, the problem is the media,” which isn’t amplifying those voices and letting them be heard.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Jay Keasling is a pioneer
synthetic biology, the process of hacking microbial DNA to produce ultra-low cost fuel and drugs. His talk, in part, is about just how difficult this hacking process is.

In building computers, we can go to Fry’s, buy some components and plug them in together. They work because we’ve got standard connectors, standard protocols. These devices function independently, and we choose to put them together in new configurations.

The same thing, he tells us, is true in the chemical industry. If you want to synthesize styrene, it’s possible to build a factory from “off-the-shelf” evaporators and fermenters, connected with pipes. Those pipes work together because someone took the time to set the pitch on pipe threads, establishing a protocol.

This is not how we manufacture biologicals, unfortunately.

Keasling is interested in manufacturing Artemisinin. Artemisinin is the latest weapon in the battle against malaria, a disease that effects 300 to 500 million people a year, killing 1-3 million of them. 90% of the people the disease kills are children under five years old. The economic impact of malaria is profound – nations effected are estimated to lose up to 50% of their GDP due to productivity losses from the disease.

For 400 years, quinine drugs have been how we combatted malaria. Wars have been fought over quinine supplies, and crazy plans have been put into place to put quinine in table salt. (We’ve settled for putting it in tonic water instead.) But the widespread use of quinine means it’s no longer effective in most of the world. The successor drug, chloroquine, now also experiences widespread resistance.

Artemisinin is a compound that comes from sweet wormwood, or Artemisia Annua, a plan that literally grows like a weed. It’s been used in China from 168 BC to cure hemorrhoids, and since 300AD to cure fevers connected to malaria. It was largely forgotten until the Chinese found themselves involved in Vietnam, and searched their ancient medical literature for malarial treatments.

Artemisinin is incredibly effective against drug-resistant malaria, but it’s not cheap – it might cost $20 for a traveller to malarial areas. In negotiation with manufacturers, some developing nations have gotten access to combination therapies at $1-2.50 per dose, which is still very expensive for a developing world government. There are wild price fluctuations in the product – as growers have seen the market, they control the supply very tightly. And some rogue manufacturers sell artemesinin with little or no active compounds in it.

Keasling’s plan is to destroy the market for fake artemisinin by selling high quality products at the lowest possible cost. This involves synthesizing the drug not via chemical synthesis – which is inefficient and expensive – but by coaxing microbes into growing it. If you have a microbe that can produce the substance, you just feed it sugar and it gives you the drug.

But making that microbe isn’t that easy. You need about 12 genes to make Artemisinin, and about 40 compounds in total to make it possible. You’ve love to go to Fry’s Biologicals and buy what you need, but that’s not how it works. Instead, you write to your colleagues and say, “Hey, I read your paper, please send me your gene.”

Your colleague responds in a couple of weeks, sends you a vial and says, “Please use as described in my paper.” You do, and it doesn’t work. You write him back and say so. He says, “Well, it worked for me. Did you follow my instructions exactly?” It’s not an efficient process. To produce Artemisnin, you need to isolate some genes, model some others mathematically, and learn how to put these genes together without having the genes kill the cells. But his lab is getting much better at doing this, improving seven orders of magnitude in producing this compound in six years. He points out that, if there were the biological Fry’s, it would have taken about six months.

Keasling is now partnering with Amyris Biotech and Institute for OneWorld Health to scale up production, get the drug manufactured and distributed. The most radical aspect of the work is the intellectual property part. These biological components are generally patented, and you need to license each of them – usually for huge fees – to build something out of components. Keasling is patenting his components – defensively – but making them available in an open license. You can use his technology to produce artemisinin on a nonprofit basis, or to produce something that contains artemisnin on a for-profit basis. This is an amazing step forward towards a world in which scientists are able to put components together and produce new solutions without entering into a legal nightmare.

He hopes to have cheap Artemisinin in people’s hands in two years. But some of this other projects are even more impressive. He’s looking at Taxol, a chemical found in the bark of Pacific Yew trees which is an effective cancer drug. The bark of one hundred-year old tree equals one dose, and there are fewer trees in the world than cancer patients. What if we could use biological synthesis to produce Taxol? Or Prostratin, a compound found in the Mamala tree from Samoa, which can be used to treat hepatitis, or to inhibit HIV infection? We could mow down rainforests, or we could synthesize this compound from sugar and microbes.

The holy grail of biological synthesis might be motor fuel. Keasling points out that we’ve increased energy consumption 85% from between 1970 and 1999, and that we’re literally running out of fuel. While it’s exciting that we’re starting to use ethanol – which is basically a process of biological synthesis, using microbes to produce ethanol from sugar – it’s a lousy fuel. “Ethanol is for drinking, not driving.” The chemical kills the microbes that produce it, which means you end up with 85% water and 15% ethanol. And most cars can use only 10% ethanol. What we really want to do is produce oil from microbes and simply skim it off the top of a vat. If Keasling can figure out how to do this, he’s likely to have a lot of money to play with to pursue drugs for all sorts of diseases.

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Our morning’s session ends with a talk and performance by musician John Legend. Legend has begun using his music as a platform for social activism, trying to get his fans interested in an issue that he’s focused on: extreme poverty. Legend is trying to support the Millenium Promise Organization – he visited a Millenium Village in Ghana, and has been working since then to “put a face on extreme poverty.”

Legend acknowledges that most of his fans may not know or care about these issues, and that they may not know what to do even if they do care. He just shot a video for a song called “Show Me” in Tanzania – that video should drop in a few weeks and will help expose his fans to the reality of life in a developing world. He’s beginning “The Show Me Campaign”, which is his charitable project to raise awareness for this issue.

Whether or not you’re into Legend’s music – and you have to acknowledge the power of his voice no matter what – and whether or not you think that Jeff Sachs’s Millenium Villages are the right way to address global poverty, it’s incredibly exciting to see a prominent musician using his fame to introduce his fans to critical global issues.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Dr. Victoria Hale is one of the founders of the US’s first non-profit drug company, One World Health. Her work focuses on diseases you’ve probably never heard of in places you’ve never been.

The first disease her firm focused on was Kala-azar, or black fever, or Leishmaniasis. It’s a parasitic disease that affects the desperately poor, some of the poorest people in the world. The parasite is spread by sandflies, and affects bone marrow, supressing white blood cell production. It presents in ways similar to anemia and HIV. It’s cureable, but the established treatment costs $300, which isn’t possible for families that earn under $1 a day.

Her firm is now running clinical trials in the Bihar state of India using Paromomycin, an antibiotic that had been heavily used the middle of last century, but became less popular when it went off patent and because it’s injectable, not oral. But it’s quite effective, and the medicine is now being tested in India, Bangladesh, Sudan, Brazil and Nepal. It’s manufactured by a firm in Hyderabad that specializes in producing generic medicines.

Geting this drug into trials and approval is part of a proof of concept for One World Health. Hale wants to demonstrate the possibility of drug discovery, clinical trials and manufacturing on a non-profit basis, not the traditional for-profit basis, supported by philanthropic money not by venture capital. She points out that generic medicine manufacturers can produce a known compound, but they don’t test the safety of compounds and get drugs approved. But the success of their Kala-azar cure – which costs $10, not $300 – is strong evidence that you can develop a nonprofit pharma company… or perhaps a nonprofit company in any industry.

Hale’s personal path to this work came from working for the FDA, then working for cancer drug firm Genentech. At some point, she was disturbed that the medicines she was working on were useful to fewer and fewer people because they were so expensive. Now her focus is on drugs that are cheap enough to address hugely widespread diseases like malaria and cholera.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding her work on malaria, and has committed to elimination of malaria worldwide, a huge and astounding task. “It’s not just global health and making new medicines. It’s clean water, education, women’s rights.” The problem isn’t just health – it’s poverty, and we’ve got to focus on all these priorities. She closes by quoting the late Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop: “There is no more powerful institution in society than business. It is more important than ever before for business to assume moral leadership in society.” Hale wants to see pharma businesses doing what the employees within them want them to do – making people well.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Bill Shannon takes the stage on crutches, though he can clearly walk on two legs. It’s disconcerting to see him – is he walking on crutches to make an artistic statement? To explore a four-legged dance style? Because he’s faking?

He knows you’re asking this question, so starts his talk with medical validation, “Until I validate, you won’t really be looking at me. I have to tell you why I’m using crutches.” Shannnon has a bilateral hip deformity – his hips aren’t round, and puting pressure on them creates swelling. It’s possble to have hip surgery, but that requires new surgeries every ten years. Instead, Shannon has raised walking on crutches to an amazing art form.

He demonstrates what club dancing looks like on his rocker bottom crutches. As people in the club watch him, some end up saying, “I think he might be faking it.” His response, he tells us, is “the faker squared, faking to the second power, faking faking to show my reality.” He demonstrates, taking a big step on crutches, then four baby steps with his feed on the ground, so that people can say, I knew he was faking, man – busted!”

Shannon’s art form requires an amazing range of technique. He shows us the basics of a rocker-bottom crutch. With the crutch tops in his armpits, he’s “in saddle”. But he’s capable of a “highbar thread”, where he moves his weight onto a midbar support, which allows him to reach the floor. A “lowmid” involves the armpit supported by those middle suports. Moving through these positions, he’s able to move between standing up and working on the floor. But “you can have all the technique in the world, but if you ain’t got style…”

Shannon’s got style. He started using them at age five, and as a result, he considers them an extension of his body, something he thought was very cool when he was a kid. He got off them in his teens and took up skateboaring, but came back to them in his mid-twenties. But his fluidity and style are a product of years of experience and years of non-crutch movement as well.

Lately, Shannon has been performing publicly, challenging images of disability through performance art. He explains that people don’t rush in to rescue a skater who’s trying a trick and blows it. People watching him perform on crutches initially respond by seeing him “as a poor, crippled guy”. Over time, they start seeing him as “a crippled guy who’s having too much fun.”

People project narratives, he tells us – “this guy is in trouble, I’m here to save him.” This good samaritanism can be an obstacle. So Shannon performs his “disability-based utilitarianism” in public, doing amazing things like picking up bottles while being fully upright on the crutches. It’s important, he tells us to “retain neutral pallette” so he can see people’s authentic reactionsa to his movement.

Some of Shannon’s most amazing movement is on a skateboard – he uses one for mobility purposes, moving long distances through airports, for instance. “A skater’s relationship to architecture is different from the average pedestrian.” These surfaces of the urban environment can be pushed off of, tricked on. There are tricks Shannon can do that are impossible for conventional skaters because he’s capable of making one foot weightless with the crutches. He describes his style not as “extreme”, but as “extremely laidback skating.” Watch the video above and judge for yourself.

Technorati tag: poptech2007